Further Reading

Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Now more than 20 years old but still the best account of Spanish colonization and Spanish-Pueblo relations in New Mexico.

Menard, Russell R. Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006. An excellent explanation of the causes and consequences of the Barbados sugar boom.

Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. Presents the English Civil War as a transatlantic event that profoundly remade the English Empire.

Pulsipher, Jenny Hale. Subjects Unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Explores English-Algonquian relations and their relationship to English imperial politics during the 17th century.

Axtell, James. Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America. A collection of fifteen essays from one of the leading ethno-historians that looks at the interactions between colonists and Indian peoples, showing the consequences of these encounters for both groups.

Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. Looks at religion in all sections of the British American colonies and argues it was as important to the development of American society as politics or the economy.

Breen, T. H. and Stephen Innes. “Myne Owne Ground:” Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676. Uncovers the complex and relatively—compared to later periods—egalitarian race relations of the period.

Cushner, Nicholas P. Why Have You Come Here? The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America. Provides an analysis of the missionary activity of the Jesuits in America and the ways this encounter transformed native communities.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Argues that four British migrations and cultures formed the basis for colonial and, later, American identity.

Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. A dual biography of Tekakwitha and the French Jesuit who became convinced of her saintliness; explores the native and French cultures and their deep impact on one another.

Pagan, John Ruston. Anne Orthwood’s Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia. A carefully crafted study of gender, indentured servitude, and the rise of an “American” body of legal thought in mid-17th-century Virginia.

Staloff, Darren. The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals & Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts. Argues that the clergy and magistrates profoundly shaped the social, cultural, and political world of Puritan Massachusetts through ideology.

Van Zandt, Cynthia J. Brothers Among Nations, The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660. Argues that alliances between native peoples and Europeans radically shaped the contours of the colonial world.

Web Sites

Africans in America. Accompanying the PBS series of the same title, this web site provides information and various primary materials on African American life and culture from the 1400s to the end of the Civil War.http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html

Outline of Prehistory and History—Southeastern North American and the Caribbean. Maintained by the National Park Service, this web site provides detailed information about the native peoples and their environmental impacts, archeological and historical evidence of their ways of life, and the impacts of European contact and colonization on their societies.http://www.nps.gov/seac/outline/index.htm